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420 Gigabyte Hard Drives

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the bigger-longer-and-uncut dept.

Zach Garner writes "IBM is introducing a new line of harddrives, code named "Shark", that will start from 420gig and go up to 11 terrabyte." Now thats what I'm talking about. This kinda stuff has got to make the film industry as nervous as the recording industry. But mainly it just makes things like digital audio and video mixing a lot easier. (Update: 07/27 01:32 by CT : Course a few people noted that these things are the size of refrigerators so its not like their gonna be desktop toys any time soon either)

21 of 121 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The first (and foremost) question by ravimoh · · Score: 2

    Saw a story on them yesterday. They start at $50,000 for the low end and range as high as $120,000 for the 11 terabyte model. Pricing structure is based on how much you want to store. The machines are customized for your storage needs by IBM.

  2. Re:Wow! by dillon_rinker · · Score: 2

    capacity is not the issue. Bandwidth is.

  3. Eye, I seen 'em . . . by alhaz · · Score: 2

    I've seen the 11tb model, up close and personal. If you're ever feeling chilly, just go stand next to the exaust port on one. Nice & toasty.

    The drives internal to it are, err, dangit, it's a TLA starting with S for Serial, not SCA, but something else.

    Very fast, external interface is LVD, the unit I've worked around (closed lab) was on two 20 meter cables strung along the celing. Sure, they're loud and run hot, but you can literally store them in the closet down the hall.

    --
    This is just like television, only you can see much further.
  4. Re:Not hard drives. by Tom+Christiansen · · Score: 3
    It's all memory. All (all) users say "I'm out of memory" when their hard disks are full.
    That's severely annoying to almost all of us. But it's common enough here that I did cover it in my geekspeak correspondence table. The sample program there reports: When I say memory, I mean what you would call RAM, but for you memory means what I would call disk space.

    When we get enough contest entries, we'll have a nice translator tool that we can all use to talk to the um, regular people. :-) Send me mail with any suggestions or programs. Any language is ok.

  5. MP3z by EnglishTim · · Score: 2

    Can't believe you turned down the opportunity to work out how much mp3 playlength you could fit on one, Rob...

  6. Its not exactly going to fit in that Penguin Case! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

    From what I saw last night (I think CNN) this Shark "hard drive" is about the size of 2 refrigerators. Not exactly for the meek.



    -Duke Leto

    *Absolute power corrupts the absolutely corruptable.

  7. Huge disk drives or Disk Arrays? by Sun+Tzu · · Score: 2

    The article isn't clear that these are individual disk drives; rather, they seem to be describing a "storage appliance" or a disk array. The kicker that they go to 11 Terabytes suggests the latter.

    --
    Geeky modern art T-shirts
  8. Read the article, not Harddrive: Storage System by Vudu+Child · · Score: 2

    If one reads the article, this is not a harddrive, but a Storage System. A quote

    "IBM said the new product line can handle from 420 gigabytes ... up to 11 terrabytes ... the highest capacity in the industry. The new storage systems, together with a refreshed line of storage tape backup products, help organizations record and track the massive volumes of information they create each day."

    These are huge boxes that live in enterprise data centers that have massive amounts of money.

    Sorry to dissapoint.

    --
    If you had my real name, you'd use an alias too.
  9. Not hard drives. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4

    This is a storage system, like a raid unit not a hard drive. IBM currently sells something like this, which had the code name "seascape" which basically had an RS/6000 front end and lots of IBM's SSA serial disk on the back. It runs a version of ADSM (IBM's lousy backup program) to a local tape drive. The actual RS/6K is hidden from the user, so their is no actual console you can log in to. This is what IBM is promoting along with SSA as a "SAN" soloution.

    Steve Scherbinski

    1. Re:Not hard drives. by Tom+Christiansen · · Score: 2

      A drive has about as much to do with a disk as has a wheel with a tire. I wonder whether peecee weenies get flat wheels. :-)

    2. Re:Not hard drives. by Gleef · · Score: 2

      Don't forget

      3½" Floppy = hard drive

      I've had way too many newbies try to tell me that the 3½" floppies were officially called "hard disk" or "hard drive", and the term was developed to distinguish them from the floppy 5¼" ones. At this point, I'm usually tempted to bust open their floppy, and show them how floppy it really is. If they still don't believe me, then I get to bust open their hard drive.

      ----

      --

      ----
      Open mind, insert foot.
    3. Re:Not hard drives. by Tom+Christiansen · · Score: 3
      The geek-to-luser translation table has more than one technical interpretation of what the mundanes means when they say "hard drive":
      1. controller = hard drive
      2. disk = hard drive
      3. disk controller = hard drive
      4. disk drive = hard drive
      5. drive = hard drive
      6. file system = hard drive
      7. logical disk = hard drive
      8. mount point = hard drive
      9. partition = hard drive
      10. physical disk = hard drive
      As you see, they aren't particularly precise. It's no surprise that this too should end up being called a "hard drive". Nearly everything is. :-)
    4. Re:Not hard drives. by the_tsi · · Score: 2

      After my two year stint in tech support (eeggh), there certainly are a LOT more things that lusers call hard drives...

      11. AT Chassis = hard drive
      12. expansion slot = hard drive
      (as in "my modem doesn't have lights... it's installed in the hard drive")
      13. CPU = hard drive
      ("My hard drive says 'intel inside'.")


      and so on and so forth. I think we can blame first grade classes that taught the three parts of the computer... And all along I though the *processor* was important. Silly me.

      -Chris

  10. It's NOT a hard drive! by Gleef · · Score: 3

    It's an external storage device, similar to an external RAID (in fact it probably is a RAID), it's many hard drives, plus I/O, plus a couple processors.

    You can't put this in your Pentuim, you have to plug into your external Fibre Channel or Ultra-SCSI port. These sorts of systems have been around for a while, the 430GB part isn't the impressive bit. The impressive bit is it scales up to 11TB, none of them have gotten that big before in one box.

    ----

    --

    ----
    Open mind, insert foot.
  11. Re: "the film industry nervous" by Spyky · · Score: 2

    The next Star Wars film (Episode 2) is being shot digitally. It will be the first movie to be completely digital. By the time it is released, more movie theaters will support digital projection of the movie as well, otherwise it still requires the digital images to be printed to an analog film strip. But when we get HDTV/DVD players, it will be easy to remaster the movie onto them.

    Spyky

  12. Slashdot no longer cutting edge by FascDot+Killed+My+Pr · · Score: 3

    It used to be that I heard about things first on /. and then on the radio that night or the next morning.

    Then I started hearing things on the mainstream radio news in the morning and seeing them on /. when I got to work.

    Then I heard a story on NPR on Friday that I saw on /. on Monday.

    I heard about IBM's Shark on yesterday morning from a mainstream Seattle news radio station. A very lame one. Furthermore, that "reporter" got the story right the first time around and didn't need an update to tell us the drives would be big and expensive.

    I'm sure this post will be moderated down as a troll or offtopic or something, but before it goes, heed the warning CmdrTaco--the quality of your readership is directly related to the quality of your news site. If you cut corners we cut out.
    ---
    Put Hemos through English 101!

    --
    Linux MAPI Server!
    http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
    (Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
  13. Timelone by CoolAss · · Score: 2

    Here are a few interesting facts taken from an interview with IBM in the latest issue of MaximumPC:

    Areal Density increases 60% every year, on average. At this rate, HD capacity increase by a factor of 10 every 5 years. Considering the largest HD for sale right now is 32 GB, in 7 years we should have 1 Terabyte drives in our computers.

    Yum... while I haven't filled my 18 or so GIGs yet, and I have had my computer for nearly a year... I still want more. :-)

  14. One question remains ... by felicity · · Score: 3

    ... How the heck do you back these things up? I've got a 400Gb NetApp filer (network raid array), and backing it up is a royal pain. How in the !#$^& do you backup 11Tb?

    Apparently at the annual USENIX conference, there was a talk which mentioned the fact that 1Tb disks on the desktop would not be outrageous in the next few years. That's what I'd need. All of the engineers w/ 1Tb of storage space.

    1. Re:One question remains ... by Ami+Ganguli · · Score: 3

      Two things:

      1. The advantage of the storage subsystem is that you can attach it to multiple hosts with high-speed connections. And I don't mean wimpy SCSI speeds. So you attach your backup server directly to the storage system via fibre channel and back it up to 10 Gig tape cartridges in a tape library (basically a huge jukebox).

      2. Those 11 Terabytes are probably a huge database that supports incremental backups. Basically, you NEVER do a full backup. A modern backup manager will reclaim and consolidate pools of incremental backup so you don't have to worry about restoring all the incrementals in some kind of sequence.

      By the time you get 1Tb on your desktop tape technology will be available to back it up. It might still take three or four tapes for a full backup, but that's reasonable.

      --
      It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
  15. I know this is a cluster and not a drive... by slothbait · · Score: 2

    and hence can't have a single filesystem striped across it (atleast not in the sense that ext2fs is a filesystem), but I have to wonder... What is the upward limit on the size of an ext2fs partition?

    The capacity of hard drives seems to be increasing exponentially, and I wonder how long ext2fs will remain serviceable. Of course, there are a few replacements already in the works, and hopefully we'll have the IRIX filesystem soon, anyway.

    All that said, everything important on my system (less the mp3's) still fits on a 1.6 GB drive. Linux installs just *don't* take that much space.
    Maybe I should get into sound editing to fill up my other drive...

    --Lenny

  16. Yet another Article... by Capt_Troy · · Score: 4

    Here's one more from IBM itself. This ones a lot more detailed.

    http://www.storage.ibm.com/press/disk/990726.htm


    -capt.